Prison inmates receive job training, internships

MARYSVILLE, Ohio - Caprice Moore used to see the world as a closed door. The 29-year-old mother of three said she got straight A's in high school - when she went.

Josh Jarman, The Columbus Dispatch

MARYSVILLE, Ohio — Caprice Moore used to see the world as a closed door.

The 29-year-old mother of three said she got straight A’s in high school — when she went.

But the South Linden resident got involved with the wrong crowd, she said, and made bad decisions. That’s how she ended up in front of a Franklin County judge in 2010 for the second time in two years on assault charges. And that’s how she ended up behind a double row of chain-link fence and razor wire in the oldest women’s prison in the state.

But Moore, who’s serving the last year of a three-year prison sentence at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, said that all she sees today is opportunity. Moore is one of 55 women enrolled in a first-of-its kind education and job-skills program at the prison that’s training inmates to make homes more weather-tight and energy-efficient.

The program aims to reduce recidivism among female inmates by giving them certification in a viable career. It is funded by a nearly $750,000 federal grant awarded to the Franklin County Reentry Task Force.

The task force is working with the prison in part because most of the women who go through the program will return to Franklin County when they’re released. Once home, they’ll receive one-on-one mentoring, housing assistance and a six-week internship with a company where they can use the training they got in prison.

Kysten Palmore, the county’s re-entry coordinator, said the women also will earn 15 college credits, taking courses on topics such as financial literacy, energy efficiency and “green” technology. The training leads to certification in weatherization, lead abatement and workplace safety.

“These are the things that will allow them to get in the door” and get a job, Palmore said.

During a recent class, the women learned how to build a gypsum-board box around recessed lighting fixtures to prevent air loss into an attic, and how to spot a shoddy home-heating installation. Every book lesson is followed by an opportunity to put what they’ve learned into practice.

That’s the key to making it stick, said Cheyenne Hansley, a 22-year-old Lancaster woman who has been in the reformatory since she was 18.

Hansley said the college courses were “book hard,” but the hands-on training allowed her to feel confident she could do the work. That confidence, she said, will make her transition from prison successful. She now can go to an employer and say she has these skills. Finding a job after prison is the key to not returning, Hansley said. “If people can’t find a job, they get stressed out and go back to what they were doing before.”

Hansley will face other stress, too — that of a mother returning home to a young daughter she has barely seen in four years. Also stressful will be deciding how much influence her child’s father will have on her daughter’s life. He’s in prison for the same robbery that brought Hansley to Marysville.

She said she wants her daughter to know her dad, but the parents have realized they’re not good for each other.

That’s part of what makes prison hard on women, Warden Ginine Trim said, noting that at least 75 percent of the women at the reformatory have children. Providing child care, finding a job and securing a place to live are among the barriers women face to successfully rejoining society.

“When you look at the female offender and how they come to prison, you so often see a lack of education,” Trim said.That leads to a lack of opportunities, she said, and is why the program is so important in the effort to keep women from returning to crime.In Ohio, 16.7 percent of women return to prison within three years of release. That’s lower than the 28.7 percent of all Ohio prisoners who find themselves back behind bars, although that number, too, is lower than the national average of 43 percent.

For Moore, the program brought out a little of that old straight-A student. She said she feels blessed that the program’s administrators took a chance on her. She knows, though, that one reason they chose her is that they consider her a greater risk to return to prison.

That won’t happen, Moore said. “This is opening a door. I could be somebody’s boss someday. Or own my own company.”

The Franklin County Reentry Task Force maintains a website of resources for people returning to the community from prison at www.franklincountyohio. gov/reentry.